Post-Colonial Representations of Japanese Military Heritage: Political and Social Aspects of Battlefield Tourism in the Pacific and East Asia

2007 ◽  
pp. 95-108
1978 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph B. Smith

For the greater part of the period from 1940 to 1945, French Indochina occupied a peculiar place in the Co-Prosperity Sphere of Great East Asia. Following the capitulation of France before the German army in June 1940, the northern part of Indochina became the first area in Southeast Asia to admit Japanese troops — at that stage, as an extension of the Japanese campaign in southern China. In July 1941 the Japanese advance into southern Indochina marked the first step towards a full-scale attack on European and American possessions in the whole region, which materialized in December 1941. But this military advance into Indochina, precisely because it took place before the general assault on Southeast Asia and the Pacific, had to be achieved by means of agreements and treaties with an established government. These were possible only because the French in Indochina decided to recognize the pro-German government at Vichy, so that the Japanese were able to apply diplomatic pressure both in France and at Hanoi. Once the agreements had been made, the Japanese saw no need to change the basis of their occupation of Indochina even after December 1941; they were by then preoccupied with establishing their presence in other areas. Consequently they continued to recognize the French administration in Indochina and to maintain diplomatic relations with it, so long as diplomatic pressure was sufficient to ensure that Japanese military needs were fully met.


Writing from a wide range of historical perspectives, contributors to the anthology shed new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the documentary film, in order to better comprehend the significant transformations of the form in colonial, late colonial and immediate post-colonial and postcolonial times in South and South-East Asia. In doing so, this anthology addresses an important gap in the global understanding of documentary discourses, practices, uses and styles. Based upon in-depth essays written by international authorities in the field and cutting-edge doctoral projects, this anthology is the first to encompass different periods, national contexts, subject matter and style in order to address important and also relatively little-known issues in colonial documentary film in the South and South-East Asian regions. This anthology is divided into three main thematic sections, each of which crosses national or geographical boundaries. The first section addresses issues of colonialism, late colonialism and independence. The second section looks at the use of the documentary film by missionaries and Christian evangelists, whilst the third explores the relation between documentary film, nationalism and representation.


10.1596/26102 ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Shrimpton ◽  
Nkosinathi Vusizihlobo Mbuya ◽  
Anne Marie Provo

Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of ‘The Beach at Falesé, the folktale plots of ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’, and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-397
Author(s):  
Elmar Holenstein

AbstractNot everything that is logically possible and technically feasible is also natural, for example, placing China in the exact center of a world map. Such a map would not correspond to the laws of perception.Matteo Ricci, who was the first to create Chinese world maps on which the Americas were depicted, had to choose between two ideals, between a world map that obeys the gestalt principles of perception and a world map with the “Central State” China in its center. The first ideal mattered more to him than the second, although he took the latter into account as well. The result was a Pacific-centered map.Since we live on a sphere, what we perceive to be in the East and in the West depends on our location. It is therefore natural that in East Asia, world maps show America in the East and not – as in Europe – in the West. This was the argument underlying Ricci’s creation of Pacific-centered maps, and not the intention of depicting China as close to the center of the map as possible.It is only in East Asia that Ricci was the first to create Pacific-centered maps. World maps with the Pacific in the midfield were made in Europe before Ricci, motivated by the traditional unidirectional numbering of the meridians (0°–360°) from West to East starting with the Atlantic Insulae Fortunatae (Canary Islands).


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